How I turned my card game idea into a business: Former journalist hit on a winning hand with Randomise as she sells 1,000 copies in a day

Hazel Reynolds, who quit working as a journalist to turn a card game she invented in 2014 into a business, has sold 1,000 copies in a single day.

She set up Gamely in Brighton in September last year, a month after her husband suggested she try to ‘make something of the game’ – which she had made up to lure her young sister away from her iPad – and a day before she found she was pregnant with baby Charlie.

The game, Randomise, involves players trying to act, draw or describe their random identities. The first batch arrived on December 12 last year, after a successful campaign on Kickstarter, a crowdfunding platform for creative projects.

New deal: Hazel Reynolds averages about 100 sales of the game daily

Hazel said: ‘I was knee-deep in bubble-wrap. I quit my job to set up a Kickstarter drive to test the market. We ran that in October and generated just under £4,500 in pre-orders in three weeks. We managed to turn it around before Christmas.’

By the summer of this year she was averaging 30 sales a day, enough to provide ‘a small income to live on’. She said: ‘Now we average 100 a day.’

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She has just licensed the game for French and Spanish versions. On November 5, she sold 1,000 copies of her product, which normally costs £11.99, when it featured as ‘deal of the day’ at a 25 per cent discount on Amazon.